Hello It's Me

Rundgren wrote it in 1967, the first song he ever wrote, drawing on a relationship with a girl in high school that lasted a couple of weeks. Songfacts says her father ended it over Rundgren's long hair, and that the song turns the story around into a phone call in which the singer breaks it off. He said the chords came almost directly from the eight-bar introduction to Jimmy Smith's recording of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, and Laura Nyro was an influence at the time. There is no conventional chorus, and the title is sung only once. Nazz recorded it as a slow ballad at I.D. Sound in Hollywood in April 1968, with Stewkey Antoni singing lead.

He recut it at one of the last side-four sessions for Something/Anything? at the Record Plant in New York, wanting it less of a dirge and with more energy, and it runs about ten beats per minute faster than the Nazz take. The band played it live with no overdubs and no written arrangement, in half a dozen takes at most. Only the bass was meant to come in on the fourth beat, everyone else came in early, and the false starts stayed on the album. Stu Woods devised the opening bass figure, the Brecker brothers worked out their own horn parts, and the backing singers, mostly from the Broadway cast of Hair, sang from an isolation booth. Rundgren did not think it would be a hit. Released as a single again in 1973, it went to No. 5 on the Hot 100 and No. 2 on Cash Box.

Afterlife

He has since called it a selfish song, all "me, me, me", and his albatross. He would not play it with Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band because it did not carry the message he wanted, and played Utopia's Love Is the Answer instead. It is still his second most-played song, with 809 performances on setlist.fm, and the Back to the Bars version brings in Hall & Oates, Stevie Nicks, Spencer Davis and Rick Derringer. The Isley Brothers covered it on Live It Up (1974), and Erykah Badu closed a 2015 mixtape with a version built on their arrangement, with André 3000. It plays in The Virgin Suicides and That '70s Show, and gave its title to the 2021 premiere of And Just Like That... The upload in the hypersongs web is the full album take from Something/Anything?, false starts and all, not the shorter single edit or the 1968 Nazz recording.